Alafair Burke just won a place in the club of the 20 best authors of thrillers in the USA. Plus, you will remember this book.It has substance, it made me think of Stendhal, the French romantic author of The Red and the Black, because the story comes out of the soul of the participants, not from the mechanics of the drama. Two main stories alternate in the book: on one hand, a teenager disappears; on the other Alice the self-doubting heiress of some rich mogul gets a new job and falls in a trap. She has been chosen to manage an art gallery, only to discover the body of her employer and all kinds of evidence mounting against her. She thinks somebody frames her, her father thinks it is all against him. We expect that the two stories will mesh, but when they do, it is not the way we thought it would. The motives here are complex, so the solution is too. But it all makes good sense: the psychology of each character is excellent.
On the audio: if you ever tried to read for a blind friend, you know how hard it is to maintain liveliness and interest in your voice: we can all do that for the first two pages, but then it becomes harder to focus, and this is a ten hours book. This reading by Tamara Marston is so good, you would listen to ANY story she reads. She has a contralto voice that allows her to do convincing impersonations of male-female dialogs. I certainly enjoyed the audio. (Posted on 8/2/11)